While the coming of August is enough to send most psychoanalysts fleeing the needs of their patients for the beach, it appears that not even death can keep the wizened Fromm (On Being Human, 1993, etc.) from dispensing wisdom. Fromm gained renown less for his writings about clinical psychology than for his more contemplative works that fused the insights of psychoanalysis with those of existentialist philosophy to ask--and occasionally answer- -the Big Questions traditionally left to priests, rabbis, and barkeeps. But this posthumous collection focuses on the relationship between analyst and analysand, and its goal is much more modest than that of some of his other books. Fromm is concerned here, it seems, not with building a better world but with building a better shrink.
